Renderotica

So my wife decided to floor me and bought me a new PC for Christmas. It's a gaming PC so we are hoping that helps speed up my rendering times.

Specs:

iBUYPOWER ARC 031A

120 Gig SSD

8 Gigs of RAM

6 Core AMD FX-6300

Memory Speed 1600MHz

Nvidia GeForce GT 710 GFX Card

Windows 10 ( UGH! )

I have been slowly setting it up, due to the low memory on the SSD, she also got me a 1TB External hard Drive, and an External DVD/CD R ( the machine did not come with one and I still use CD's to back up my data and content, one day I will get all that on flash drives ).

I have not yet installed D|S or any content because I want to be super meticulous about Runtime folders and file structure. I also want to run D|S on the main SSD, but all content will be installed to the external drive and called from there. So, tomorrow, I will be doing the dreaded set up the external, install D|S, point that stupid ( IMO ) DIM to the folder on the external, as well as point the D|S to the folder. I always do manual installs, extract the zip and merge the files into My Library, so I really hope this works.

I'm not a PC gamer, so if I can't get this way of controlling memory to work, then I have a pretty expensive ( for our budget ) and somewhat beefy web browsing machine.

I'm sure that six core processor is helping your render speeds as much as that Nvidia card, assuming you've enabled CPU rendering in Daz.

Keep an eye on the free space on that SSD, though. I use the same size SSD as my primary drive, and I've found that it's best to use it for OS files only. Even now, it's only got about 40GB free space left. I have 3 internal hard drives, my SSD, a 2TB conventional HD that I use for storage (all of my photos, videos, download zips, etc), and a 500GB conventional drive that I have all of my programs installed on, i.e. Daz, Photoshop, and so on.

My specs:

Quad core Intel i5 3.4 GHz

16GB RAM

Nvidia GTX 1080 8GB

I built this machine mostly myself with the help of a friend that has forgotten more about PC's than we'll ever know, LOL.

Most of my hardware is about 6 years old now, but it still works well. Only my graphics card is a recent addition. I used to run a GTX 780 card, and it worked well, but took a while to finish complex scenes. When I upgraded to the 1080, I rerendered a couple of scenes to get an idea of the performance difference, and I was floored. Scenes that had taken two hours to render before now finished in 15-20 minutes. I have a usable test render for most scenes in one or two minutes. At one point I'd considered disabling a credit card in order to get an Nvidia Quadro workstation graphics card, but I just couldn't justify spending 4 times what I'd spent on the rest of the machine for one component, and I doubt the performance and speed increase would be worth the money. Overall, I've only invested about $1500 in my computer, not including the monitor, which I've changed several times, and will likely change again this weekend thanks to Xmas gift cards. I'm jumping from a 27" to a 32".

Congratulations on your new machine!!

Originally Posted by: shadoman

surprised that a gaming PC comes without a internal Hard drive.  I know many laptops do but a PC??

Only negative I can see is the lower rate of transfer speed from an ext drive verses an internal one 

Also when I bought my system I was told to never defrag my ssd card as they can over time be affected by contant removal and reloading of files.

 

Have fun and happy rendering

Shadoman

Yeah, something about the way flash memory works, the little gates (that read 1 or 0) actually do wear out after a certain number of uses. A normal computer user should get 5 years or more before the drive starts to fail, extreme users a shorter time. So the more you use an SSD, the sooner it will fail, BUT most will still outlive their usefulness, you'll probably be ready to upgrade to a larger SSD long before the old one fails

The other side of the coin is that SSDs don't benefit from defragging since there's no physical drive head to move. It doesn't matter if a file is all in one continuous segment or broken into a thousand segments across the drive, an SSD should be able to access both at about the same speed. The best thing you can do is try to keep at least 10% of your drive free, that way the OS doesn't shuffle files around so much trying to get things organized.

If you like Youtube videos, LinusTechTips explains it a lot better than I can.